Nope, nothing there to indicate why it did that. Off to the manuals I go, finally find this. GRRRR! show create table work_queue confirms that it set both the default AND the on update to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP when the table was created. Several attempts to modify the table fail to achieve anything even remotely close to what I want. In the end I did a mysqldump of the entire database and modified the creation script to be as such:

So the magic bullet to create a mysql table that has a column that tracks INSERTION time, but NOT UPDATE TIME? A self referential on update no action. And you can only do that when you CREATE the table, there's no way to get alter to accept that as near as I can tell.

Now that that's out of my system, a quick update on the caatt clients: I've decided to do a quick LAMP implementation instead of a native OS/X client. It already knows who you are, asks if you've not told it, and remembers... and it can dump a list of work to do, with overdue item's highlighted separately. Details of a task and marking it complete were what I was working on when this stopped me. Oh yeah, and I slapped together a quick logo/favicon for it with OmniGraffle (and photoshop for cropping, since OmniGraffle's export sometimes picks bizare margins).